First post, by bmwsvsu
After about 5 hours of playing around and attempting to troubleshoot this, I'm about ready to throw in the towel.
Motherboard: Compaq uWave
CPU: Duron 900
Ram: 256MB PC100
Video: AGP (currently a GeForce2)
So here is what DOES work:
-Hard drive detected fine by BIOS
-Machine will boot to a Hiren's boot CD just fine.
-Hiren's XP boot environment works fine
-Hard drive shows up in XP boot environment - I can partition it, format it, copy and paste files to and from it. I can use Ghost to image it.
Here is what does NOT work:
-Booting a Windows 98 installation disc, after it says "Setup is checking your system configuration," it IMMEDIATELY halts with a R6003 Integer Divide by Zero error.
-Booting into DOS from Hiren's - running FDISK immediately gives a "Divide error"
(neither of the above errors occur if I boot without the hard disk connected to the board - Win98 setup simply says it can't install since there's no hard drives and FDISK says no fixed disks installed).
-Booting into a pre-imaged drive which works perfectly fine on another Windows 98 system immediately spits out the error "Error Loading Operating System. Setup cannot continue." This is opposed to a different error if I attach a blank drive which simply says something along the lines of no operating systems found.
I've tried different ram, a different video card, a variety of hard drives ranging from an old 20GB ide drive to a 32GB SSD DOM to an 80GB ide drive to a CF-to-IDE adapter, all to no avail. Always the same results.
Anybody here have any ideas? There's not really much to play around with in the BIOS as far as settings, and as I said, I CAN communicate properly with the hard drive from within an XP environment booted from Hiren's.
EDIT - to add to this, I've tried 2 different motherboards just to rule out a bad board and tried different ram and even a PCI video card, and all still the same. Quite literally the only thing I haven't swapped out for something different is the CPU.